Friday, March 13, 2009

Camera Review - Panasonic DMC TZ5

A completely unsolicited review. Last night was my daughter's class performance of "The Pirates of Penzance" so I grabbed a camera I bought about a year ago, the Panasonic DMC-TZ5, and shot a bunch of pictures with the flash off. I didn't think much about it, until I downloaded the pictures, and then I was completely amazed by the quality of these totally automated snaps.

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves (you can click on the images to see them at full size) but technically speaking, I was zoomed about halfway in, shooting at the full picture size of 9MB, in regular automated shooting mode. I have not done anything to the files and bear in mind that posting a picture somehow always seems to slightly flatten out and diminish the image.

The camera is just slightly bigger than a deck of cards and when closed, the lens protrudes about 3/8 of an inch from the body, making it just out of true pocket size. That quibble is of course more than compensated for by the quality of the pictures. And it takes pretty good video too!

wow... great images! I have been hearing people rave about these little cameras for several years now, and the quality of the Leica lens on them. The LAST thing I need is another camera, but it really would be nice to have a quality pocket digital for those times when it is just a pain in the butt to lug around my enormous 5D.

Quote: "I have not done anything to the files and bear in mind that posting a picture somehow always seems to slightly flatten out and diminish the image."Do you have Lightroom? In the develop module, the Clarity at about 30 and the Vibrance around 40-50 will jack your images up enough to make em look decent upon web delivery.

my family all bought these for a trip of ours to Africa - and the pics turned out FANTASTIC! My friend who is a professional Digital Photgrapher - was so in love after viewing them and using ours - she bought one too!

Your review pushed me over the edge. I just got my new DMC-TZ5 from Amazon yesterday. It's really nice. I have fingers made crooked by arthritis and will have to learn to hold it, but I'm happy so far. Thanks for this posting and all of the others. Come and read me to see how I do.

"I have not done anything to the files and bear in mind that posting a picture somehow always seems to slightly flatten out and diminish the image."

This is a color management issue. Your photos are posted with no profile embedded - I'm guessing that they were in the Adobe 1998 profile at some point (in camera or in software) and in the process of uploading the profile tag was lost. Most web browsers do not pay attention to color profile tags anyway so images need to be converted to the sRGB profile before uploading to look decent.

"If only all blogs were as life-affirming and tender-hearted as that of gallerist James Danziger. Whether his focus falls on the work of an individual artist or a particular theme, The Year in Pictures is compulsive reading."